Lab Meeting, Summer 2016, Week 7

Awe- and Aw-inspiring readings (or just stuff you think deserves a mention)

Thomas, E. R. (2002). Sociophonetic Applications of Speech Perception Experiments. American Speech, 77(2), 115. doi:10.1215/00031283-77-2-115. Short, concise review of perception studies in sociophonetics up until 2002 (including lots of interesting dialect perception/classification work. thomas-2002.pdf -DFK

Prepared and presented talk at Uni Potsdam. Had plenty of interesting conversations, including with Lena Jaeger (post-doc in Shravan's lab), Shravan Vasishth, Bruno Niecenboim (post-doc in Shravan's lab), Reinhard Kliegl (stats, visual processing, etc.), Isa Wartenburg (prosody and fMRI, etc.), and Ulrike Demske (hist ling). Fun!
Feedback on Esteban's NRSA report.
Feedback on next steps for Guillermo's paper on Talmy's typology.
Lots of back and forth with NSF about grant proposal with Scott Fraundorf.
Declined three requests to review.

Revised commentary for Frontiers on sociolinguistic salience and language processing
Edited proofs of encyclopedia article on speech perception
Prepped and gave invited colloquium talk on syntactic alignment
Worked a bit on job application materials

Drafted outline for dissertation intro
Ran forward predictions for adaptation to second VOT dist learning experiment based on prior beliefs inferred from first.
Continued to analyze talker- and group-level VOT and vowel distributions.
Wrote methods, and drafted intro/discussion for paper on talker- and group-level VOT and vowel distributions

Read some papers on the use of Miniature Language Systems and how they work; for work with Wes on QUD and absolute/gradable adjective learning. This week we're reading a bit about how kids acquire adjectives (though, I'm pretty certain that this is more about figuring out that adjectives are about features, and not objects, rather than learning about how to use different adjectives).
Worked on a new version of a kid task, and the first kid in the task did well - but hard to tell if she would have done well without the handholding.
Worked out all of the recordings I need to do for the naming task.
Met with the Kinder Koders and showed them a simple way to make an alarm clock (complete with creepy alarm notification sound clip) in python, worked on writing a script to autocrop, resize, and save clipart images (will only work if there is already no background... it's a start, and easier than asking RAs to edit such images).
Ran a norming study for Bethany on Turk. We then chatted about the replication study results (and different ways to look at her data issues, now that she has the norming data from turk).
Worried about my grant.

Performed some sanity checks for the eyetracking data. The downstairs computer is having all sorts of technical issues (usually following a computer restart), and so sometimes it's a pain to get it even to open the program. But once it does, things usually run smoothly. Started running subjects.
Organized eye-tracking pilot data into a form that Lauren might be able to play around with. Having her learn R via some tables/plotting.
Prepped and gave RA tutorial of MTurk. Some RA organizational things.
Worked on editing/writing more of intro and experiment 1 based on Florian's comments.
Talked to AP about what level to give RA eyetracking analysis tutorial in R at. We decided that I should have them learn dplyr to make things easier.
Looking into buying a used car. It's incredible how many sketchy ads there are on Craigslist... and how many Honda Civics from the 90s there are still around.